078 - Serpents, Staffs and Secret Arts

You pick up your Bible and wonder, is there more here than meets the eye?

Is there something here for me? I mean, it's just words printed on paper, right? Well, it may look like just print on a page, but it's more than ink. Join us for the next half hour as we explore God's Word together, as we learn how to explore it on our own, as we ask God to meet us there in its pages.

Welcome to More Than Ink. Sometimes people say seeing is believing, but do you have to see a miracle in order to believe? Well, a miracle would definitely help me sometimes. I saw a miracle, I believe. How big a miracle does it take? Well, any miracle works for me. Because today we're going to see Pharaoh see a miracle and refuse to believe.

He refuses to believe today on More Than Ink. Well, we're delighted you're back with us. I'm Jim.

And I'm Dorothy. And we are marching our way through Exodus. And many of us know the Exodus story, but we're going to act like we don't know anything about it. If you can do that.

If you can do that, yeah. So we are, God's in the process in this story where we are, we're starting chapter seven. He's in the process of getting the Israelites out of the captivity in Egypt because things kind of turned sour there for the last couple hundred years. They got in captivity and slavery. And God says that's enough of that.

We're taking them out. And he's got Moses and Aaron engaged to deal with Pharaoh. And we already have one interaction with Pharaoh under our belt, right? Right.

As far as Moses is concerned, that didn't turn out well. Well, and this is where the conflicts really begin. Exactly.

In your face statements. So yeah, so that's where we're starting. And today we're going to have one of many in the following weeks confrontations between Pharaoh and Moses and Aaron. And sure enough, in fact, where we left off the end of chapter six. The end of chapter six, Moses rolled out his lame excuse again.

Well, he's like he's reviewing it. He's reminding his readers or the people he's writing to. And this is me. This is the way I was.

This is the way I was responding. This is the last three verses of chapter six. On the day that the Lord spoke to Moses in the land of Egypt, the Lord said to Moses, I'm the Lord. Tell Pharaoh, king of Egypt, all that I say to you. But Moses said to the Lord, well, behold, I'm of uncircumcised lips. How will Pharaoh listen to me? And that's where we left off. It sounded like Moses is changing his mind.

He's not going to get involved. But as we come to chapter seven, it looks like he has a change of heart. Well, well, it's not just that. I remember it where we left off. Also, God had said to them, I charge you. Just go do this.

I mean, he had finally said, quit your excuses. I'm with you. I will do this. I'm going to do this.

So you go do it. Yep. So now we're in the action phase.

Right. So let's just jump into chapter seven. And we're going to see how this dialogue goes between Pharaoh and Moses. You want to start for us in chapter seven verse one?

Sure, sure. And the Lord said to Moses, See, I've made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron shall be your prophet. And you shall speak all that I command you, and your brother Aaron shall tell Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go out of his land. But I will harden Pharaoh's heart. And though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, Pharaoh will not listen to you. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and bring my hosts, my people, the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt by great acts of judgment. The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the people of Israel from among them.

We'd better stop there. So that's just God telling Moses, sidle up to Pharaoh and say this. And this is what he told. I mean, he gave Pharaoh kind of a plot spoiler about what's going to happen. This is what's going to happen. God's going to get us out.

That's what's going to happen. And he also tells Pharaoh that God knows that Pharaoh won't listen to him. Yeah, there's a lot of information about God and about Pharaoh in this little paragraph.

Yeah, it's really interesting. And presumably, if I go a tiny bit ahead in six, Moses and Aaron did so. So at this point, it sounds like Moses actually and Aaron did go in and say this very thing.

Fasten your seatbelt. Here we go. What you see from what you see from what is that like verse, verse two up and through verse five, five. Yeah. So it looks like so that's actually a summary of what's going to happen in the next chapters that are going about the summary of the rest of the book in a sense. And he tells Pharaoh this up front and, and Pharaoh's reaction in this section and God tells him this is what your reaction is going to be is a hardened heart. Yeah. You know, I want to spend some time before we're done with this half hour talking about that condition of the heart, because that is one of the that is the recurring theme actually through all.

Yeah. Every time Pharaoh is mentioned, it mentions the status of the hardness of his heart. Well, there's some 18 times in the next few chapters where we receive a statement about the condition of Pharaoh's heart. And sometimes it's passive.

It happened. Sometimes it's very active. Either God is hardening or Pharaoh himself is hardening. Yeah. So that's going to be an important pattern to pay attention to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, it made me think just as we're starting to think about the hardness of heart issue, I recalled back to those passages, there's two places in, I think it's in Ezekiel where he talks about, you know, I'll remove your heart of stone, give you a heart of flesh.

Right. And that was, it's, it's the same imagery, really. A heart of stone is a heart that can't be moved. That's not, you know, you can't, you can't persuade it in any way.

It's kind of set in its ways. And in fact, the ancient Egyptians, you know, when they mummified people, they put hearts in place, they put rocks in place of their hearts so that spiritual temptations wouldn't happen after death and they would be persuaded to leave the truth. And God knew that. So he says, yeah, what I need to do is I need to replace these hearts of stone, give you a heart of flesh. And so right here, what we're seeing is the heart of Pharaoh turning more and more into stone. It cannot be influenced.

It cannot be moved. But we know, we already know that at the end of the story, it will be. Well, and we also know that that was his condition already. Yeah.

Right. And so that's one of the things I want to point out in the next few weeks as we go through this, where God is simply responding to the condition of Pharaoh's heart. Kind of according to Romans 1, when God says, you know, I've put all this in front of them, they're without excuse.

So I'll just hand them over. They can have what they want. So, and you can, you can read that passage yourself in Romans 1 18 through the rest of the chapter one. But it's very descriptive of that hard hearted process where a flat out refusal to believe the truth about God or what God says. Yeah. And you know, in this paragraph where Moses tells Pharaoh what's going to go down, he says that God will multiply signs and wonders in the land of Egypt.

So it's funny because what he's saying is that despite the fact that God will give you more evidence than you need to know who I am, still you were, you will not be willing to believe. So really hardness of heart is more about a willingness rather than a intellectual grasp of the facts. Right. It's about a refusal to listen to God's voice. So we, you know, the scripture says pretty clearly that we are responsible for the condition of our own hearts.

Right. We can direct our heart. We can set our heart. We can seek the Lord or we can do what we want. Do what God wants. And that's, that's what Romans 1 says. They didn't want God. They wanted a God of their own making.

So we let them have it. So that is kind of a commentary on the process we're going to see happening in Pharaoh. Yeah. And it dawned on me as I was reading this again, that part of the process of hardening a heart is, you know, when you believe something that's crazy, like I could say gravity doesn't exist, you know, and then someone will come up to you and say, well, why don't you go up in the edge of your roof and jump off and tell me if gravity exists or not. And then you resist that and you resist every good piece of evidence for the fact that what you're, what you're believing is wrong. But the issue is if you become kind of pigheaded and stubborn and heart of heart, you've already decided that you will not believe anything else.

And so the more evidence that comes your way, and in this case, we're talking God says signs and wonders, the more evidence that comes in your place, the more you choose to kind of dig your heels in. And for me, that's kind of a picture of what hardening of a heart is. Well, that actually comes real close to the actual meaning of one of these words. There's a small handful of words, two main ones in the Old Testament that gets translated as this hardening. And there's overlapping in their meanings.

Some of them are more poetical than others. But the overall idea is to grow rigid, to become resolute, obstinate, stubborn, to make tough, to toughen up and firm up. So, you know, sometimes God is doing it, sometimes Pharaoh is doing it himself. And sometimes it's just happening in the natural process of resistance, right? If you train your muscles within resistance, they get stronger. The more you resist, the stronger you get at it.

And so that's the process we see happening. I would even say the more that God plops down evidence in front of you that is God, it causes him to become harder. Well, we're going to see that in the passage today and the one we're going to talk about next week. And truly, you can say that if this whole event wasn't going to happen and God wasn't plopping down his signs and wonders in front of him about who God is, Pharaoh's heart would not really get harder.

It would be hard, but it wouldn't get harder. So in a way, God's complicit in this hardening because he's putting facts in front of Pharaoh and he's having to have Pharaoh choose whether he's willing to believe this or not or whether he'll oppose it. And so that those facts, that evidence, those signs and wonders will actually, the end result, it will harden his heart because he just will not believe, will not. Okay, so should we push on? Sure. We'll get back to the hardening part because I think that's an important thing.

It is. That's an important thing. So in verse six, let's start off from verse six. So Moses and Aaron did so, you know, they said this to Pharaoh, this is what's going to go down, they did so and they did just as the Lord commanded them. And now Moses was 80 years old and Aaron 83 years old when they spoke to Pharaoh.

So that's pretty good documentation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we know that he was 80 when he encountered God at the burning bush. Right. So this is three years later. Right.

So that's a pretty, you know. So it says here Moses is 80 right now. Oh, Moses was 80. That's right. It's Aaron who's 83.

Sorry, I misread it. So it's actually contemporaneous to the burning bush. Yeah, it's real close. Yeah, really, really close.

Yeah, I was trying to put that together while I was saying it and I'm like, wait, what? But didn't Moses go into the Midian and run away from Egypt when he was 40? Yeah, so a whole generation later. Yeah, so this is a new chapter in the life of Moses. Yeah, so it's interesting. So we're not looking at men who are vital in their years, so you can apply from this that they're not going to kind of bowl over Pharaoh with their influence.

I mean, these are, these are old guys doing this, so it's clearly not their power. Okay, let's jump into verse eight then. So then the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, when Pharaoh says to you, prove yourselves by working a miracle, then you shall say to Aaron, take your staff, cast it down before Pharaoh that it may become a serpent. So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh, did just as the Lord commanded Aaron, cast down his staff before Pharaoh and his servants and it became a serpent. Let's just stop right there before what the response comes up. So, so we've seen this before.

Yeah, we have a couple of times. Yeah, if you go back to chapter four, we see this, God says, you know, throw down your staff, pick it up by the tail, remember that entire episode and then presumably at the end of the chapter, they do it in front of the people of Israel as an authentication. So, and it's interesting because that's one of the signs that God gave Moses to show the people, the Jews, if they don't believe you, do this, right? And there's an interesting side note here and I won't spend much time on this, but these could be crocodiles instead of snakes. What?

Oh. Yeah, and the only reason that, and that's a speculative, but the only reason for that is that the serpent word that's used just in this section, we just read it in verses nine, 10 and wherever. Yeah, but the, the serpents right here, just in this half of chapter seven is a different word than the serpent word that's used everywhere else. Like the serpent word that's used in Genesis three for Satan being in a serpent, that word's completely different and it comes from a word that means to hiss, to make a sound. And it also, that word hiss turns into kind of a suggestive temptation, you know, so it got spiritualized, but it's a different word altogether. This, this word for this serpent right here, just in the first half of chapter seven is totally different. Okay, that's pretty interesting.

I haven't looked into that. And it's most often translated as serpent in the rest of the places in the Bible, but it also is translated as whale and sometimes as jackals. Uh, but it, but it, it really, it's the closest translation we have to it is the word monster and it's mostly used in sea monsters and stuff like that.

So it was applied to sea monsters, to river monsters. So the speculation is, well, if we're talking about a river monster, you know, crocodiles were a big deal in Egypt. And on top of that, maybe this is the first challenge to the deities of Egypt because there was a crocodile, a crocodile deity.

Yeah. And he, you'll see him in pictures with a crocodile head and stuff like that. And, uh, and he was meant to evoke fear and respect and caution on people's parts. And he was always the one basically who represented the fear and respect you should have for Pharaoh. So in a sense, if these were crocodiles, they were kind of like, they were kind of like images of the actual power of Pharaoh. And before we get to the next part, uh, this crocodile God was also one who was one of the protectors of the Nile. So, uh, so in a second we're going to see how the Nile gets trashed. And so, so it could vary if these are crocodiles, it fits the symbology. It could very well be that he makes a crocodile on the ground, which represents the fear and power and influence of Pharaoh, which in the end is going to get gobbled up.

That's all speculative. You know, that's very speculative, but it's interesting when, when, you know, Moses throws down his staff, if it became a crocodile that it would eat the illusory ones or the fake ones or the little tame ones. You just gave away the plot line. The magicians haven't read that part yet. Now everyone's saying, that's it, I'm turning it off. You know this story, you know, even, even unbelievers, non Bible readers know this story.

It's very common. Yeah. Well, let's finish the story then. So Pharaoh summoned the wise men and the sorcerers and they, the magicians of Egypt also did the same by their secret arts for each man cast down his staff and they became serpents or maybe crocodiles.

We don't know. Uh, but Aaron staff swallowed up the staffs, their staffs and, but still Pharaoh's heart was hard and he wouldn't listen to them as the Lord had said. So sure enough, Pharaoh brings out his guys and his guys threw down their staffs and they become snakes slash crocodiles. However, the real miracle happens right after that because, cause, cause the Aaron staff ate all the rest of them up. Right.

Now that's a hard one to, that's a hard one to duplicate. So, uh, well, and also if these guys, you know, were practicing sleight of hand and they had snakes up their sleeves and flung them on the ground, well, they're not going to get their snake back. Yeah, exactly.

It's gone. Yeah. Can't do that trick again until you go get more snakes. So that's not, that's not just a slight end to the story. That's like the story is the fact that these snakes are battling and Aaron snake wins.

How about that? And he went, he eats all of the other snakes, not just one of them. And we don't know how many there were, but this is, he summoned his wise men and sorcerers.

This is probably a group of guys. So now you think about this. If they're snakes, there's like, I don't know, 20 snakes on the ground from the wise men and sorcerers. And then there's Aaron's one snake and it goes around and eats every one of them.

Wow. I mean, that's, that's an amazing thing. What a statement of supreme power in something that they would never, you know, if I was going to write a fairytale, a myth fairytale, and you did this kind of thing, one guy would throw down a snake and other guy would throw down a snake and then your snake would eat the other guy's snake. Your snake, there'd be a battle between the snakes and it's the, it's which snake wins. That's really the story, not the fact that there's snakes there. And so, and sure enough, that's exactly where this story goes as well. But this is not a myth.

This is a real thing that happened, a real thing that happened. In nature, I like the, I like the vision of crocodiles on the floor. Well that's visually, it's visually appealing. But the issue is, and we talked about this a little bit when God initially gave Moses this sign, is that that reptile symbolized maybe perhaps the power of the river but symbolized Egypt itself. Yeah, exactly. God was going to take Egypt and shake it by the tail and, and show his power in that way in an unmistakably visual way that no one could miss the message here. Exactly. And, and if the crocodile god, the Sobek is his name, if this crocodile god actually represented the power of Pharaoh, because that was the, that was the most powerful image they had was the crocodile.

If he, if he represents the power of Pharaoh, then right here before we even start the plagues, we're throwing down the gauntlet and saying the power of Pharaoh is going to get devoured. Right. Yeah.

So that's a, it's an interesting image. So, you know, as we go forward, this is kind of the opening scene on the, the plague story. Yeah.

You and I talked yesterday a little bit about what kind of questions should we as Bible students begin to be asking. Yeah. As this story unfolds. Before you read it. Before you read it, because we all know what's coming. Yeah.

Right. We know the plagues. We just don't know, you know, what kind of specifically maybe what they were, what the understanding of the Egyptians had. But you know, the first question that came to my mind is, what is this telling us about God? And what is it telling us about us or about the people in the story? If we identify with the people. Right. We identify with people in the story. We're identifying with, with Pharaoh or with Moses and Aaron or with the hapless people to whom all of this stuff was happening.

What is being indicated about heart conditions? Yeah. So it's interesting to track the characters in the story, to see them change, if that's what you're getting at. Well, it is. It's one of the things. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I was, one of the questions I was going to ask myself, and by the way, this is, this is a Bible study technique I do is when I come into a passage, it's very familiar. I, and there's still questions hanging in my head that I've never, I've never asked before.

So I'm going to ask questions I've never asked before. And, and for instance, for me, a very obvious question is why didn't God just snap his fingers and get them out of Egypt and just, you know, transported them, you know, Star Trek style into the promised land and be all done with this. But this seems like, this seems like a drawn out drama that has purpose to it.

So, so one of the questions I'm going to ask myself is why choose going the playground at all? I mean, why do you need plagues? God doesn't need plagues.

Right. What is this about? So why is he using plagues? There must be some kind of very deliberate plan in God's mind for why he's using plagues. And then on top of that, why, why not just one or two? In fact, why not just skip to plague number 10?

And why these specific ones? So there is design in everything God does and accomplishment in everything he does. So clearly the only purpose here isn't to get them out of Egypt, but to do something in the process of getting them out of Egypt. So that's a question I'm going to ask as we continue to go on.

Well, and that connects to my question. What is being indicated by God here? What is God doing? Because God is clearly the most active agent to the story. Exactly. What's God doing?

How are the people responding? What's the purpose? And watch for repetition, because we're going to begin to see patterns emerge. So with each one of these rounds of plagues, watch for what is repeated, because we know we're going to be told repeatedly something about the condition of Pharaoh's heart. But are there some other repeated factors? Watch for those things. Watch for contrasts, watch for similarities. And how do the plagues differ from one another?

Those are some real practical observation things that we can practice. If you presume that God has a deliberate communication plan for every plague, then it's a fascinating thing for us to ask, so what? What is it? What is it right here? So again, this is a deliberate, drawn out drama.

It's not an instant relocation plan. It's a process that God finds very valuable. And in the process also, we'll see change in Pharaoh's heart, we'll see changes in Moses and Aaron's heart. They're learning stuff as a result of the circumstance change.

That's fascinating. Even on the people's hearts, at the very end, the people in Egypt are saying, bye, go away. But if you remember last week, we had said that the beginning of God's deliverance may look like disaster.

It looked like that last week. And so for this next sequence of chapters as these plagues unfold, this is going to look like a slow motion disaster. Not just to the people of Egypt, but at the beginning, it's going to look that way to the Hebrews too. Yeah, exactly.

Not until halfway through that God begins to draw a separating line and the plagues fall on the Egyptians, but not on the Hebrews. That's an interesting question. Where does that switch happen?

And why? Yeah, where does that switch happen? So we're just setting the whole thing up here so that you can read ahead and begin to observe these things yourself, because we only have 28 minutes to talk about it. But you and I, I know we both are really big believers in the fact that great Bible study is based on great questions. And so sometimes if you know the passage well enough, instead of just cruising your way through it, ask new questions, put questions in front of you. It gives you something to look for on the way as you're going down the path.

And that's always really valuable. And God will answer questions as you go, especially if they're questions you've never asked before. Well and making time in your reading for those questions to emerge, right? Because sometimes we read too fast. We just get through the passage from the beginning to the end without pausing to go, huh, what just happened? Take a breath and ask the question, why is that here?

Why is that here? God does things deliberately. Nothing is because God's constrained.

He does them deliberately. And so you can always ask the question, why did God do it this way? So that led to my question, you know, is there a sequence to these things and why this order, why these specific events? So we're going to see that unfolding.

That'll unfold as we go, because next time we come together, we're going to hit the first plague. But one of my other questions too, my questions always sound so shallow. Why does the staff play such a big role? That's a really interesting question. And if you think I'm overblowing it, here's a little piece of trivia for you, if you haven't read ahead in this book and in the next books of the Torah, is that that staff that Aaron cast down in verse 10 today, that ends up being in the Ark of the Covenant.

What? The staff of Aaron, that budded, yes. So why is that? Why does it have such a prominent position there?

Isn't that interesting? So why is there a staff? And what does that mean? Does it mean something to them?

It doesn't mean to me? Because we talked about before, the staff, Moses' staff, Aaron's staff, both become in a sense characters themselves in the story. It's really pretty amazing and it's something that we can't relate to because, hey, I don't walk around with the staff. Now you're chapters and chapters and chapters ahead of this event. I know. But see, that's the reason why I ask the question because I know that's coming. But most people don't know that's coming. I know, but still I'm intrigued by the whole staff thing.

Well, I am too and the staff is one of the repeated elements that keeps showing up and showing up and showing up. But we're getting short on time and I want to circle back to the hardened heart. Okay. Let's do that because that's important. Because we kind of tend to think that that's something that only happened to Pharaoh. But Psalm 95 says, today if you would hear God's voice, do not harden your hearts like they did in the wilderness. And the writer of Hebrews, which we discussed a few months ago, picks that up, that very passage and says, now take care, brethren, in chapter three, lest there be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart in falling away from the living God. And he goes on to quote that Psalm 95 while it said, today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as when they provoked me. And he says point blank, it was their hardened hearts due to the deceitfulness of sin that caused them, even in the face of God's repeated miracles, to disregard him.

So isn't that ironic that Pharaoh here is the one with the hardened hearts and before they get into the promised land, the people of Israel. God's own people are subject to the possibility of that. And we are.

And we are as well. It has nothing to do with the volume of evidence God gives to us or what he says. Because even in Psalm 95, before the hardening part, it says if you hear his voice, which means you're hearing something, you're getting information. If you hear his voice, your response could be hardening. Don't harden your heart against that.

Don't say la, la, la, la, stick your fingers in your ears. If you hear his voice, will you respond? And we're back to the issue of willingness.

That's what it is. And a hardened heart grieves God. So we are going to watch as Pharaoh and eventually the people of Israel have hardened hearts because despite the fact of all the evidence, all the evidence that's surrounding them, the signs and wonders for Pharaoh, the parting of the Red Sea, plot spoiler that's coming up to all that stuff, that stuff should figure in their minds and hearts in order to embolden them to believe what God says.

But they don't. So it's just ironic again, the more evidence that's presented to a heart that's not willing to believe the harder that heart becomes. Well so we are out of time. We hope you join us next time as we jump into plague number one and it's pretty interesting. It's fascinating. And we'll take a look at that as we, that's the second half of the chapter seven. And we will take a look at that and ask all of our questions. I'm Jim.

And I'm Dorothy. And we're glad you're with us here on More Than Ink. More Than Ink is a production of Main Street Church of Brigham City and is solely responsible for its content.

To contact us with your questions or comments, just go to our website, morethanink.org. Because it doesn't work today. It doesn't, yeah. Yeah. So we didn't think this through. No we didn't. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.